This summer Kiara Dookie and Sam Wemmer spent their afternoons in the New England Review office. They researched other literary magazines and conducted interviews with outside editors for our “How the Work Gets Done” project, read submissions in all genres, designed a promotional display for Davis Library, and much more. Here they interview each other for our “Meet the Interns” series.
What’s your major, where are you from, and what brought you to Middlebury?
Sam: I’m Sam and I’m a senior. I come from Salem, Massachusetts, but I was actually born in Beverly, Massachusetts, a nearby town. I’m a biology and English double major. Coming into college, I knew I wanted to pursue biology and English, or philosophy, or something to do with the humanities. I read about the English department here and they have a really good creative writing program. There’s Bread Loaf—New England Review, of course—and that’s why I decided to come here.
Kiara: I’m Kiara and right now I’m a senior studying sociology and computer science. I’m from Trinidad and Tobago. I feel like my whole college process was just overly complicated. I wasn’t originally planning to be in the US at all! I originally planned to go to the UK to study physics, but then after taking two gap years, I somehow ended up here in Middlebury . . .
What else do you do on campus?
Sam: I do radio most semesters. I have a radio show on WRMC with my friend Samuel and my other friend named Sam called Uncle Sam’s Double Cup Chocolate Cookie. Before that I had a radio show called the Sound Machine that was just me, and I would play music to listen to in outer space or in a submarine: dream pop, slow electronic kind of stuff. But when I’m on the radio now I just play whatever I want. I feel like there’s this pressure to have a theme, but mostly what I play is what I’m listening to that week and then I kind of shoehorn it into a theme. Besides radio, I like to walk and hike. I walk to the Knoll a lot by myself and listen to music. I’ve gone on one official Mountain Club trip, so I guess I can say I’m involved in Mountain Club. I’ve done the philosophy symposium a couple of times. And then I guess the biggest thing would be NER—first the reading group, and now the internship.
Kiara: I’ve been on the board for Women of Color since junior year. I think it’s probably my favorite extracurricular. This past semester I was also on the board for PALANA. What else do I do? I work at Crossroads Café, that’s also pretty fun. I wouldn’t say there’s much I’m super involved in beyond that. I worked at the Knoll during freshman and sophomore year, I’ve gone to a couple WiCS++ events, and I tried to start a Caribbean Student Union, but that didn’t get approved. I lived at the Solar House last year and hosted a bunch of events like a hotpot and mahjong night, a mooncake workshop, and an end-of-the-year cookout. I ran my J-term Caribbean lit workshop there too. I guess this internship is my new thing.
What has been your favorite thing about working at New England Review?
Sam: Definitely reading submissions. I mean, we get about 9,000 submissions a year? 10,000? Somewhere in that ballpark. Part of the job is just sifting through this huge volume of submissions. I would say my favorite submissions to read are fiction, short stories specifically, but we’ve read poetry, essays, works in translation. I just love to read, you know. Sometimes it’s really not good stuff, sometimes it’s even quite bizarre, and then sometimes it’s really amazing, like . . . Ooh, I don’t know, are we allowed to talk about the stories before they’re published? I don’t know. That might be top-secret information.
Kiara: Okay, I think my honest answer is the same. We’ve been doing a lot of reading over the summer and I always look forward to it. Usually I’m not a poetry person, I prefer prose, but I think just having to read more poetry and actually talk about it made me appreciate it more. I think going through that longer process of learning how to read it and then how to be critical with it, especially compared to prose, made me enjoy it a little more than I expected. I remember that one time we did a group discussion with Nico (NER staff reader) and the poetry in translation—I think it was poems translated from the French—those were really good. The translations were strong and some of the poems had really vivid images. But it just didn’t feel like NER, you know?
What’s your favorite class at Middlebury?
Sam: My favorite class was called “Faulkner and His Influence” with my advisor, Brett Millier. It was a seminar, maybe about 11 or 12 people, and we read a book a week. It was intense reading, but every day in class people were ready to pounce on the subject. Everybody had pages of notes and underlines and sticky notes sticking out of their books. That was such a fun course and I also just enjoyed reading Faulkner. He’s a unique writer. I think at the time he held the record for the longest sentence in English literature. It just spanned pages and pages. He’s since been surpassed, but he’s a cool one.
Kiara: I took a modern Chinese literature class in my sophomore fall that I really enjoyed. I was honestly so nervous going into it because I don’t have a literature background and I didn’t know much about Chinese lit at all. I felt kind of out of my depth. But once the class actually started, I didn’t feel intimidated at all. The readings were so cool and Professor Wang was amazing. I really want to take another class with her. I also really liked the class dynamic. Usually I’m not much of a talker, I tend to keep to myself and just do my little written assignments, but in that class it felt like everyone had something to say and it wasn’t intense or overwhelming.
Let’s take a quick break for some rapid fire questions: You’re trapped on a remote island for eternity and you can only bring five books with you. Which books do you bring?
Sam: Moby Dick, Underworld, Jesus’ Son, A Good Man is Hard to Find, and Absalom, Absalom!
Kiara: The Vegetarian, Greek Lessons, A Little Life, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and Dracula.
What about movies?
Sam: Perfect Days, Inland Empire, Wall-E, Mysterious Skin, and The Royal Tenenbaums.
Kiara: Aftersun, Lego Batman, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Kung Fu Panda 2, and The Lobster.
Favorite fruit?
Sam: Mangoes.
Kiara: Rambutan (secretly mangoes).
Favorite cheese?
Sam: Parmesan.
Kiara: Brie.
Sometimes you don’t make lunch and ‘have’ to go into town for food. Where would you recommend future interns go on their lunch break?
Sam: Shiretown.
Kiara: I think I’d probably go to ShireTown too, cause it’s pretty close to the office.
Okay, back to the larger questions. What has changed for you since the start of the summer?
Sam: In the beginning of the summer, I wanted to learn how to fly fish. I’ve learned how, so I think that’s the biggest change in my life. At first I watched YouTube tutorials because the hardest part is casting. It’s kind of like a lasso, you have to whip it back and forth. Imagine you have a stick that’s like ten feet long and there’s a line coming out of it. You can pull more line out of a spool but you have to whip the stick forward to make the line shoot out of the tip. I’m going to go again today because it’s cold out. They’re cold water fish, mostly. When it’s hot they’re lazy and don’t want to eat.
Kiara: There are a couple of things that have changed. I think the way I read new material is really different now. Before, I let my own preferences guide everything. I stuck to a certain kind of prose. Now I’m more open to reading new things, especially poetry. With this internship, you learn how to set your biases aside and read more openly in order to appreciate different kinds of material.
I’ve also always appreciated the process of curation, putting things together and seeing how they take shape over time. Doing this job, I developed a deeper appreciation for that slower, more intentional process. Even reading submissions takes time: going through them, discussing them, deciding what’s worth sharing.
What has been your favorite piece that’s been published in NER piece?
Kiara: The poem “Alternate Reality” by Ugochukwu Damian Okpara. The structure stood out to me. It’s so compressed with the repeated use of slashes. The poem itself is strong too.
Sam: The story “Young Sheldon Room Tone” by Nick Mandernach. Maybe I’m biased because I just read it, but it’s a beautiful story about a man who loses his infant son and copes with the grief in an interesting way.